Zerohedge has this up without any analysis.. which I really would rather not have seen since I decided not to worry about this crap anymore. From the looks of the map (I assume it's a computer model), the xenon 133 seems to love Florida -- it's pooling above the whole state.

Did some googling.. here's an article about xenon 133 detection, of course they say it's so minute it's less than everyday background radiation:

RICHLAND -- Additional minute quantities of radiation linked to failed nuclear reactors in Japan have been detected by Pacific Northwest National Laboratory in Richland.

(snip)

The first radiation in the continental United States from the Japan crisis was detected by PNNL on Wednesday. DOE said xenon 133 has been detected at 0.1 disintegrations per second per cubic meter of air.

"The levels of xenon 133 that PNNL detected were extremely low and pose no health hazard," PNNL said in a statement. The radioactivity detected is at a tiny fraction of what a person receives each day from natural background sources, such as the sun, according to PNNL. DOE and EPA described the amount of radiation received by people by natural sources as 100,000 times the amount in the particles and gas detected in Richland.

Since Wednesday, levels of slightly higher xenon have been measured, but they still are significantly below levels of concern to public health, according to PNNL.

What about all the above ground nuclear testing that took place during the last century. I'd worry more about that being a part of everyone’s glow then this incident.

The average pace of nuclear weapons testing is remarkable: Since 16 July 1945 there have been 2,044 tests worldwide, the equivalent of one test occurring somewhere in the world every nine days for the last fifty years.

The U.S. has conducted the equivalent of one nuclear weapons test every 17 days since its first test; the Soviet Union has tested on average every 23 days; France every 63 days; Britain every 349 days and; China every 222 days. India has conducted only one test so far.

Nuclear weapon test explosions have been carried out in all environments: above ground, underground, and underwater. They have occurred on top of towers, onboard barges, suspended from balloons, on the earth's surface, underwater to depths of 2,000 feet, underground to depths of more than 8,000 feet, and in horizontal tunnels. Test bombs also have been dropped by aircraft and fired by rockets up to 200 miles into the atmosphere.

The things that will destroy America are prosperity-at-any-price, peace-at-any-price, safety-first instead of duty-first, the love of soft living, and the get-rich-quick theory of life.
... Theodore Roosevelt

kmann wrote:That IS extremely low. All this shows is that the atmosphere is well mixed.

But.. that's just one article from one town in California.. doing a google news search I pull up very little, just a couple local articles on the west coast.

So, this is just the test result for one particular spot. That's not necessarily indicative of the entire US.. could be "less than background" in one Cali town but maybe more than that in another town a few states over where nobody is testing. I admit I'm out of my depth here.. from what I've been reading though, it's a lot more complicated to test for xenon than just looking at a geiger counter. These tests are only going to be done at a few select locations nationwide.

I for the life of me do not understand the irrational and excessive fear of radiation! Get educated about it already!

Well.. this whole unfolding story has been drip-drip-drip. The Japanese have downplayed it from day one and yet there's a new revelation everyday.. latest is that they've found radiation in milk and spinach.

timmac wrote:Are those actually readings of radiation or just speculation..

From what I gather testing air samples for xenon and whatnot is complicated, so I don't think it's possible to have a 100% for sure nationwide fallout map. The site is in German.. I assume the animated GIF is a computer model.

kmann wrote:That IS extremely low. All this shows is that the atmosphere is well mixed.

But.. that's just one article from one town in California..

No, that's Richland, Washington. Just south of the Hanford Reservation. Battelle (PNNL) is a civilian owned company with lots of DOE and other government contracts. This is one of the premier nuclear research labs in the country. They also did the software work for the TSA full body scanners used at airports.

"Modern Agriculture is the use of land to convert petroleum into food."
-- Albert Bartlett

"It will be a dark time. But for those who survive, I suspect it will be rather exciting."
-- James Lovelock

DomusAlbion wrote:No, that's Richland, Washington. Just south of the Hanford Reservation. Battelle (PNNL) is a civilian owned company with lots of DOE and other government contracts. This is one of the premier nuclear research labs in the country. They also did the software work for the TSA full body scanners used at airports.

But the point remains.. it's a local air sample, from one particular city, no?

In other news by the way.. Tokyo tap water is radioactive and the US has banned some Japanese food imports.

DomusAlbion wrote:No, that's Richland, Washington. Just south of the Hanford Reservation. Battelle (PNNL) is a civilian owned company with lots of DOE and other government contracts. This is one of the premier nuclear research labs in the country. They also did the software work for the TSA full body scanners used at airports.

But the point remains.. it's a local air sample, from one particular city, no?

True Six. It wasn't a criticism, just a correction of facts. I was just pointing out where Richland is and that it's not just an ordinary city. There are some very sophisticated tools on hand at that particular city. Also I would say that after passing the Pacific Ocean the distribution of the radioactive particles is fairly even, so the measurements taken at PNNL are probably typical for the west coast.

"Modern Agriculture is the use of land to convert petroleum into food."
-- Albert Bartlett

"It will be a dark time. But for those who survive, I suspect it will be rather exciting."
-- James Lovelock

DomusAlbion wrote:Also I would say that after passing the Pacific Ocean the distribution of the radioactive particles is fairly even, so the measurements taken at PNNL are probably typical for the west coast.

The computer model I posted in this thread shows the xenon pooling around a few states in particular (Florida for one). From the looks of the computer models anyhow, distribution doesn't seem to be even. Seems to me the Energy Department should plan to be able to take measurements in every county in the US.. not for this Japanese disaster per se, but for the next one.

But again I know I'm out of my depth here.. I don't even know if it's possible to take an "air sample" in one state then test it on the other side of the country (in other words, do you need to have all the lab equipment on site where you take the sample).

Exposures 50 years ago still have health implications today that will continue into the future

Prior to 1950, only limited consideration was given to the health impacts of worldwide dispersion of radioactivity from nuclear testing. But in the following decade, humanity began to significantly change the global radiation environment by testing nuclear weapons in the atmosphere. By the early 1960s, there was no place on Earth where the signature of atmospheric nuclear testing could not be found in soil, water and even polar ice.

Cancer investigators who specialize in radiation effects have, over the intervening decades, looked for another signature of nuclear testing—an increase in cancer rates. And although it is difficult to detect such a signal amid the large number of cancers arising from "natural" or "unknown" causes, we and others have found both direct and indirect evidence that radioactive debris dispersed in the atmosphere from testing has adversely affected public health.

The earliest concern about health effects from exposure to fallout focused on possible genetic alterations among offspring of the exposed. However, heritable effects of radiation exposure have not been observed from decades of follow-up studies of populations exposed either to medical x rays or to the direct gamma radiation received by survivors of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombs. Rather, such studies have demonstrated radiation-related risks of leukemia and thyroid cancer within a decade after exposure, followed by increased risks of other solid tumors in later years. Studies of populations exposed to radioactive fallout also point to increased cancer risk as the primary late health effect of exposure. As studies of biological samples (including bone, thyroid glands and other tissues) have been undertaken, it has become increasingly clear that specific radionuclides in fallout are implicated in fallout-related cancers and other late effects.

Internal irradiation exposures can arise from inhaling fallout and absorbing it through intact or injured skin, but the main exposure route is from consumption of contaminated food. Vegetation can be contaminated when fallout is directly deposited on external surfaces of plants and when it is absorbed through the roots of plants. Also, people can be exposed when they eat meat and milk from animals grazing on contaminated vegetation.

Iodine-131, which for metabolic reasons concentrates in the thyroid gland, has a half-life (the time to decay by half) of about eight days. This is long enough for considerable amounts to be deposited onto pasture and to be transferred to people in dairy foods (Figure 4). In general, only those children in the U.S. with lactose intolerance or allergies to milk products consumed no milk products, particularly in the 1950s and 1960s when there were fewer choices of prepared foods. Radioiodine ingested or inhaled by breast-feeding mothers can also be transferred to nursing infants via the mother's breast milk.

Doses from fallout received in the 1950s and 1960s have been estimated in recent years using mathematical exposure assessment models and historical fallout deposition data.

Dose-assessment models predict a decreasing gradient in the ratio of external radiation doses to internal doses from inhalation and ingestion with increasing time from detonation to fallout arrival. The relatively large particles that tend to fall out first are not efficiently transferred to the human body. At more distant locations in the region of local fallout, internal dose is relatively more important because smaller particles that predominate there are biologically more available. For example, in rural villages along the trajectory of the first test (August 1949) at the Semipalatinsk Test Site, average estimated radiation dose from fallout to the thyroid glands of juvenile residents decreased with increasing distance from the detonation, but the proportion of that total due to internal radiation sources increased with distance. At 110 kilometers from the detonation site, the average dose was 2.2 Gy, of which 73 percent was from internal sources, whereas at 230 kilometers, 86 percent of the average dose of 0.35 Gy was from internal sources.

Nevada Test Site (NTS). The NTS was used for surface and above-ground nuclear testing from early 1951 through mid-1962. Eighty-six tests were conducted at or above ground level, and 14 other tests that were underground involved significant releases of radioactive material into the atmosphere.

In response to Public Law 97-414 (enacted in 1993), the U.S. National Cancer Institute (NCI) estimated the absorbed dose to the thyroid from I-131 in NTS fallout for representative individuals in every county of the contiguous United States. Calculations emphasized the pasture-cow-milk-man food chain, but also included inhalation of fallout and ingestion of other foods. Deposition of I-131 across the United States was reconstructed for every significant event at the NTS using historical measurements of fallout from a nationwide network of monitoring stations operational between 1951 and 1958. Thyroid doses were estimated as a function of age at exposure, region of the country and dietary habits. For example, for a female born in St. George, Utah, in 1951 and residing there until 1971, the thyroid doses are estimated to have been about 0.3 Gy if she had consumed commercial cow's milk, 2 Gy if she had consumed goat's milk, and 0.04 Gy if she had not consumed milk. For a female born in Los Angeles, California, at the same time, the corresponding values would have been 0.003, 0.01, and 0.0004 Gy. (A link to these data is available in the bibliography.)

Following the publication of the NCI findings in 1997, the U.S. Congress requested that the Department of Health and Human Services extend the study to other radionuclides in fallout and to consider tests outside the U.S. that could have resulted in substantial radiation exposures to the American people. Examples of results extracted from the report (a link is available in the bibliography) are shown in Figures 7 through 9 and 11. Figure 7 shows the pattern of deposition of cesium-137 (Cs-137), a radionuclide traditionally used for reference, resulting from all NTS tests in the entire United States. Fallout decreased with distance from the NTS along the prevailing wind direction, which was from west to east. Very little fallout was observed along the Pacific coast, which was usually upwind from the NTS. Estimated bone-marrow and thyroid doses are illustrated in Figure 8. The fact that both external and internal doses were roughly proportional to the deposition density is reflected in similarities between the two figures. Estimates of average thyroid and of bone-marrow doses for the entire U.S. population are presented in Figure 11; the thyroid doses from I-131 are much higher than the internal doses from any other radionuclide and also much higher than the doses from external exposure.

Global fallout within the U.S. Global fallout originated from weapons that derived much of their yield from fusion reactions. These tests were conducted by the Soviet Union at northern latitudes and by the U.S. in the mid-Pacific. For global fallout, the mix of radionuclides that might contribute to exposure differs from that of NTS fallout, largely because radioactive debris injected into the stratosphere takes one or more years to deposit, during which time the shorter-lived radionuclides largely disappear through radioactive decay. Of greater concern are two longer-lived radionuclides, strontium-90 and cesium-137, which have 30-year half-lives and did not decay appreciably before final deposition.

In 1997, NCI conducted a detailed evaluation of dose to the thyroid glands of U.S. residents from I-131 in fallout from tests in Nevada. In a related activity, we evaluated the risks of thyroid cancer from that exposure and estimated that about 49,000 fallout-related cases might occur in the United States, almost all of them among persons who were under age 20 at some time during the period 1951-57, with 95-percent uncertainty limits of 11,300 and 212,000. The estimated risk may be compared with some 400,000 lifetime thyroid cancers expected in the same population in the absence of any fallout exposure. Accounting for thyroid exposure from global fallout, which was distributed fairly uniformly over the entire United States, might increase the estimated excess by 10 percent, from 49,000 to 54,000. Fallout-related risks for thyroid cancer are likely to exceed those for any other cancer simply because those risks are predominantly ascribable to the thyroid dose from internal radiation, which is unmatched in other organs.

A total of about 1,800 deaths from radiation-related leukemia might eventually occur in the United States because of external (1,100 deaths) and internal (650 deaths) radiation from NTS and global fallout. For perspective, this might be compared to about 1.5 million leukemia deaths expected eventually among the 1952 population of the United States. About 22,000 radiation-related cancers, half of them fatal, might eventually result from external exposure from NTS and global fallout, compared to the current lifetime cancer rate of 42 percent (corresponding to about 60 million of the 1952 population).

It is important to note that, even though the fallout exposures discussed here occurred roughly 50 to 60 years ago, only about half of the predicted total numbers of cancers have been expressed so far.

In the U.S., it took a number of years for the differences in dose and cancer risk from regional and global fallout to be understood. We have learned that the internal doses from global fallout were considerably smaller for the thyroid, but greater for the red bone marrow, than those from Nevada fallout, whereas the doses from external irradiation were similar for Nevada and for global fallout.

We estimate that in the U.S. the primary cancer risks from past exposure to radioactive fallout are thyroid cancer and leukemia.

Nuclear testing in the atmosphere began 60 years ago. It ended in 1980, in part because of public concerns about involuntary exposure to fallout. By that time, increased cancer risk had been established as the principal late health effect of radiation exposure, based primarily on studies of populations exposed to medical x rays, to radium and radon decay products from the manufacture of luminescent (radium) watch dials and in uranium mining, and to direct radiation from the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Since then, organ-specific dose-response relationships for radiation-related risks of malignant and more recently benign disease (for example, cardiovascular disease and benign neoplasms of various organs) have been increasingly well quantified with further follow up of these and other populations, and it is increasingly clear that radiation-related risk may persist throughout life.

This article is a pretty reasonable summary of the information available out there, IMO. I would just like to draw attention to three of the statements in it which highlight the major divide on the subject:

And although it is difficult to detect such a signal amid the large number of cancers arising from "natural" or "unknown" causes, we and others have found both direct and indirect evidence that radioactive debris dispersed in the atmosphere from testing has adversely affected public health.

However, heritable effects of radiation exposure have not been observed from decades of follow-up studies of populations exposed either to medical x rays or to the direct gamma radiation received by survivors of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombs.

A total of about 1,800 deaths from radiation-related leukemia might eventually occur in the United States because of external (1,100 deaths) and internal (650 deaths) radiation from NTS and global fallout.

To the extent the health risk from atomic weapons testing has increased the risk of cancer, it seems quite difficult to distinguish those risks from the larger risk pool of cancers which arise independent of any radionuclide exposure, as the article states (this for either internal or external exposure). Even if we assume the numbers stated for leukemia (1,800) this is a very, very small number compared to a wide array of other risk factors the average person encounters in life. For example, in excess of 15x that number are killed each year in auto accidents in the U.S. alone (~33,000 in 2012).

In addition, those of us who advocate looking at nuclear power as a potential tool in the fight against the depredations of both peak oil and climate change, I feel safe in saying, are decidedly not advocating the resumption of nuclear testing.

The warnings about fallout from nuclear tests six decades ago often noted that cancers from the radiation would probably not begin appearing in large numbers for many years. But that time is now – and medical experts are wondering whether the surge in some cancers is a result.

Back in the 1950s and 1960s, the Atomic Energy Commission doused the entire United States with thyroid cancer-causing iodine-131 — and 300 other radioisotopes — by exploding atomic and hydrogen bombs above ground. To protect the dirty, secretive, militarized bomb-building industry, the government chose to warn the photographic film industry about the radioactive fallout patterns, but not the general public.

In 1951, the Eastman Kodak Company had threatened a federal lawsuit over the nuclear fallout that was fogging its bulk film shipments. Film was not packed in bubble wrap then, but in corn stalks that were sometimes being fallout-contaminated.

By agreeing to warn Kodak, etc., the AEC and the bomb program avoided the public uproar — and the bomb testing program’s possible cancellation — that a lawsuit would have precipitated. The settlement kept the deadliness of the fallout hidden from farmers and the public, even though the government well knew that fallout endangered all the people it was supposed to be defending.

This staggering revelation was heralded on Sept. 30, 1997, in the New York Times headline, “U.S. Warned Film Plants, Not Public, About Nuclear Fallout.” The article began, “While the Government reassured the public that there was no health threat from atmospheric nuclear tests…” The fallout’s radioactive iodine-131delivered thyroid doses to virtually all 160 million people in the U.S. at the time.

According to the Institute for Energy and Environmental Research (IEER) in Takoma Park, Maryland, which discovered the cover-up, children were especially affected and received higher doses because they generally consumed more milk than adults and since their thyroids are smaller and growing more rapidly. The “milk pathway” moves radioiodine from grass, to cows, to milk with extreme efficiency — a fact known to the government as early as 1951.

Ingested iodine-131 concentrates in the thyroid gland where it can cause cancer. Average doses to children averaged between 6 and 14 rad, with some as high as 112 rad. Prior to 1997, the government claimed that thyroid doses to children were 15 to 70 times less.

The National Cancer Institute disclosed in 1997 that some 75,000 thyroid cancer cases can be expected in the U.S. from just 90 — out of a total of 235 — above-ground bomb tests and that 10 percent of them will be fatal. That year, the NCI said, about 70 percent of the thyroid cancers caused by iodine-131 fallout from those 90 tests had not yet been diagnosed but would appear years or decades later.

The 14-year NCI study also said the 90 bomb blasts produced more than 100 times the radioactive iodine-131 than the government had earlier claimed. The NCI estimated that they dispersed “about 150 million curies of iodine-131, mainly in the years 1952, 1953, 1955, and 1957.”

The study reported that all 160 million people in the country at the time were exposed to the iodine-131 (the only isotope out of more than 300 that were dispersed by the bomb blasts that it studied). Children under 15, like Steve O’Neil and all the Baby Boomers, were particularly at risk. High doses of fallout were spread nation-wide. Wind patterns and local rainfall caused “hot spots” from Montana and Idaho to South Dakota, Minnesota, Missouri and beyond.

he National Cancer Institute’s 1997 study said about 16,000 cases of thyroid cancer were diagnosed in the U.S. annually, and that 1,230 would die from the disease. This estimate turned out to be a gross under-statement.

Today the NCI reports that 60,220 new cases of thyroid cancer will be diagnosed in the U.S. this year, and that 1,850 of them will be fatal. The thyroid cancer “balloon” is with us because the nuclear weapons complex under Presidents Dwight Eisenhower and John F. Kennedy attacked the very people it was said to be defending. Yet, it gets worse.

The UN Scientific Committee on the Effects of Atomic Radiation says that iodine-131 doses comprise only two percent of the overall radiation dose from weapons testing. Ninety-eight percent of our fallout dose is from 300 other isotopes produced by the Bomb.

It is not idle speculation to suggest that the cancer pandemic afflicting the people of the U.S. has been caused by our own government’s deliberately secret and viciously reckless weapons program.

According to the National Cancer Institute in 1992, about 150 million curies of radioactive iodine was released in open air from nuclear testing in Nevada, causing heavy contamination of the nation's milk supplies from the early 1950's to the early 1960's. This is more than 20 times the amount estimated to have been released by the Chernobyl nuclear accident in 1986. At the time of open air testing, millions of children were drinking this contaminated milk. In the early 1950's when radioactive fallout was over-exposing film in cardboard made with contaminated straw, the Eastman Kodak company secretly complained and was given routine warnings by the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission. The public was never warned by the U.S. government about the dangers of consuming milk it was contaminating in its quest to amass a nuclear arsenal.

After the ratification of the Limited Test Ban Treaty in 1963, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration established "Protective Action Guides" for Iodine-131 that triggered removal of dairy products from human consumption following nuclear accidents. Had these limits been in place during the open air nuclear testing in the 1950's and early 1960's, the NCI study indicates that milk supplies would have had to be removed from the markets for months at a time. The NCI admitted in testimony before the U.S. Congress in 1998, after an investigation by the U.S. Senate Governmental Affairs Committee, that it suppressed this study for 5 years. The NCI also conceded this may have caused as many as 212,000 excess thyroid cancers.

Cancer control and prevention is a major challenge, but the potential payoff is monumental. One of the most striking findings contained in the Report was that approximately half of all cancers worldwide could be avoided if our current knowledge about cancer prevention was put into practice. The modifiable behavioral and environmental factors that contribute most significantly to cancer include smoking, infections (namely hepatitis B and human papillomavirus [HPV] for liver and cervical cancer, respectively), alcohol consumption, obesity and physical inactivity, radiation exposure (sun and from medical devices), air pollution and other environmental factors, and delayed child bearing and not breastfeeding.

So, radiation did make it on to the list, though there was no direct mention of atomic weapons testing.

A quick view of Slide 3 will demonstrate the cancer rates in the U.S. peaked (for both men and women) sometime around 1990 and have been on a quite steady decline since. Just about everything I have read in other sources indicates this is in no small part due to a decline in smoking and an improvement in early detection and treatment.

Also, in Slide 2, Thyroid Cancer does not get a call out as a class, but appears to be lumped into the category of "All Other Sites." The top three sites are Lung, Prostate, and Colon for men and Lung, Breast, and Colon for women.

.Iodine 131 has an half life of 8 days , the milk pathway is a problem because the production and distribution of fresh milk is very fast .any traces of contamination after ten years is difficult to separate from the backgroundafter forty years it is impossible to be sure

The UN Scientific Committee on the Effects of Atomic Radiation says that iodine-131 doses comprise only two percent of the overall radiation dose from weapons testing. Ninety-eight percent of our fallout dose is from 300 other isotopes produced by the Bomb.

And again we are talking about ingestion of particulate and it's incorporation into tissues of the body, not external radiation exposure.

"For my part, whatever anguish of spirit it may cost, I am willing to know the whole truth; to know the worst and provide for it." - Patrick Henry

The level of injustice and wrong you endure is directly determined by how much you quietly submit to. Even to the point of extinction.

Strontium-90 is concentrated in milk and has a half-life of over 30 years. These particles just don't go away, they are concentrated in bone, substituted for calcium, and affect the bone marrow.(blood cell production)

If a limited nuclear war happened between 1951 and 1962, and the largest number of detonations occurred in the last 5 years resulting in a total 390 nuclear blasts, 205 in the US, you would be far more concerned.

The fact that they occurred "peacefully" makes no difference.

The byproducts of these blasts reached the stratosphere and dispersed globally raining down fallout for years afterwards.

It has existed in the dust you inhale ever since. Some isotopes have half-lives measured in millions of years. On human-scale terms, forever.

Bioaccumulation happened in water, sediments, fish, waterfowl; it accumulated on grasses, ingested by cows and goats, concentrated in their milk and and made it to your grocery shelf.

The US decided in 1963 it would be too costly to the economy to try to prevent the milk from reaching your refrigerator.

6.16 As to long-lived radionuclides such as strontium-90 the Council notes that processes for the removal of radionuclides from milk developed jointly by the Department of Agriculture, the Public Health Service, and the Atomic Energy Commission are now being evaluated for the feasibility of full-scale production for possible use in an emergency.

6.17 However, in the Council's judgment, major national programs directed at removing strontium-90 from food supplies would not contribute to the national welfare. Even if the strontium-90 levels in human bone reached those corresponding to the Radiation Protection Guide, the removal of strontium-90 from foods would not necessarily be in the best interests of the nation.

The Council would have to consider whether the health risk would be great enough to justify the total impact of such a program on the economy and the necessary allocation of national resources in relation to the health benefits that might be achieved through feasible reduction in strontium-90 intake.